Gunpowder
by narcolepticbadger
Summary: "You bite down on your tongue, draw blood, and tell yourself that this is reality." Nicky leaves, and Lorna begins to wonder if she was ever really there.


One sleepless night, a trip into Lorna's mind, and we're back to our regularly-scheduled angst. Consider this the antidote to 'This Tornado Loves You' if you will.

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><p>Nicky leaves on a Thursday.<p>

The days before her release are filled with touches, whispers in the dark, letting the rest of the prison fall away because nothing is more important than committing her to memory, every last detail, and this way you never have to say goodbye.

She has days, and you have months, and you don't exactly promise each other anything, but you've spent the last three years waiting on each other and coming together, a study in tidal action, and why should this be any different?

At first you miss her in all the usual ways.

You cry as Piper rubs your back.

You take to bolting out of rooms when a loose memory staggers you, stalks you, threatening to cut you in half unless you outrun it.

You start half a dozen letters with _Hey Nicky_ before you're stumped by how to fill the rest of the paper. Nothing changes in Litchfield, and you don't have an address to send them to anyway.

You leave a place for her at the table and try not to flinch when, one day, Soso stops asking if she can sit there and just shoulders her way in.

You turn to tell her a joke and find yourself talking to shadows. Sometimes you finish the punchline anyway, trying to imagine her laughter and that crooked smile she always wore, but there's nothing – an empty chamber, an echo too faint to be understood.

She left you her things – clothes and a radio and tubes of mostly dried-up makeup. You have no practical use for them, but you keep everything, clearing off a shelf and a pair of hooks just for her.

Boo walks in on you staring at the wall, something of Nicky's cradled in your lap or pressed against your chest, and she says the same thing every time:

"Jesus, she's not _dead_. Don't you think erecting a shrine is a bit much?"

You sleep with her clothes, wrapped up in her sweatshirt or hugging it around your pillow, and you can still feel her warmth, smell her skin, wake up with strands of her hair threaded with your own where they've stuck to the fabric.

For weeks everything is mostly okay until you realize that the shirts don't smell like Nicky anymore, they're just shirts, and suddenly it's like someone pulls the trigger in your head, over and over, until the ammunition runs out. When the smoke clears, you begin to see the holes.

The light from the stained glass windows rains down around you both, catching in her hair, on her skin. She sighs as your fingers brush down the scar on her chest, and for once she doesn't call you _kid _or _Morello_ but just _Lorna_ in the second before her lips are on yours, and you know she sees you more clearly than anyone else ever has or will again.

Or: you've never touched her scar – always a curiosity, but she would catch your hand before you could and guide it elsewhere, and you wondered if she even knew she was doing it or if it was some unconscious act of something like self-preservation. You've never kissed. She's never said your name. These are all part of the rules sunk deep into the ground between you, things you never had to talk about because they were laid out so clearly, landmines dotted on a map, from the beginning.

You can't tell the difference between fiction and memory now, you never could, but this is the first time it hurts you, leaves you gasping as you remind yourself that she existed, she _exists_, she's out there somewhere taking showers and listening to the radio and rolling over in bed, the both of you tied to an old routine even if you're miles apart. You bite down on your tongue, draw blood, and tell yourself that this is reality.

Your hands shake a little more as you put your makeup on, and you have to spend extra time cleaning up the edges, making the lines sharp again. If it wasn't down to muscle memory, you probably wouldn't bother, but every day your hands move of their own accord, twisting fabric in and out of your hair, the dust from a packet of instant coffee staining your fingertips like gunpowder.

You have so many questions you want to ask. _Did she have freckles? What was the song she always hummed when she was bored? What color were her eyelashes when she didn't wear mascara? _Past tense, always. You just want to clarify the details, pull Nicky back into focus, but the others already think you're crazy, and they don't need to know that things are starting to slip away from you again.

You know the feeling all too well.

This is what your brain does. Erasures and revisions and inventions. Trying to pick through the old images, the old conversations to find something that hasn't been written over is like picking burrs out of your hair – the harder you try, the more stubbornly the burrs stick together, and you just keep pricking your fingers.

The taste of something bitter rises in the back of your throat. There is a flash of awareness that comes to an animal the instant before a trap closes around it. You know this because you are the animal, the steel is closing on your leg, and there's nothing you can do. There is no way out.

There aren't any pictures of you together. Nicky drew the pair of you before she left – nothing fancy, but it's cute, and you leave it taped to the wall. But now it seems like the colors are fading, and you pull it down, frowning, turn it around and around in your hands as you try to see what you saw in it before. You remember your mother looking at a mess of scribbles you once made and pretending to understand it: _Of course, it's a dinosaur, Lorna. Of course I see the family. _

Boo comes back and gets in your face about the mess, and you stare blankly at her until she picks up a handful of shredded paper and dumps it into your lap, tells you to keep the crazy on your side of the room. You find pieces of the drawing in your sheets for days, and you roll each one into a tiny scroll before dropping it lightly in the trash.

You start losing time. It's like watching sand trickle through an hourglass – it hardly seems to move at first, you have all the time in the world, you're mired in time, before some artery is cut and you're bleeding out. The sand falls so fast it blurs into a landslide, and five hours have slipped past before you notice.

You talk and talk and talk because people are exchanging glances now whenever you walk into a room. You talk to show them that you're fine, everything's fine, and you talk to shut off the voices for as long as you can. You don't even know what you talk about, can't remember a single conversation after it ends, and Soso's the only one still nodding along every time you open your mouth.

Nicky sends a letter that you can't read. You open it and stare at the words and can't recognize a thing. Piper finally pulls the paper away from you and reads it aloud. You catch snatches of words – something about a job, a phone number – over the drumming of your heart but all you can think is that you've never seen Nicky's handwriting before, anyone could have written the letter, this isn't her, this is a trick.

Red takes you aside and sets her hands on both sides of your face, tilting your head until you have to look her in the eye, and asks you to talk to her, to tell her what they can do to help you. You nod and smile, and that's not what Red wants. She slaps you across the back of the head, tells you to snap out of it, before she crushes you in her arms and whispers, "You don't get to leave yet. Not you."

You want to tell her that you're not going anywhere. You're here. It's Nicky who left, Nicky who keeps leaving you a little more each day.

Everyone looks at you like you might walk off the edge of the world if they let you out of their sight for a minute. And you wonder, what edge? Litchfield wraps in on itself, corridor upon corridor always leading you back to the same places. Safe. Just another labyrinth you can't find your way out of.

Red talks to Caputo or someone else, and they start giving you pills. You don't ask what they're for, you just take them, obediently, a dry swallow and an open mouth. They make the world a little hazier around the edges. Things quiet down. You fall asleep in the middle of the day, in strange places. Luschek kicks you awake twice from where you've fallen asleep on the lamp you're supposed to be fixing before he puts you in the cage to collect chits and give out tools. You keep your eyes closed until someone raps on the metal bars with their wrench, and you shuffle back and forth, taking, giving, writing down names.

Everyone reminds you about the phone number in Nicky's letter. They say she wants to talk to you, and one day you go down and dial and she's _there_. You can hear her breathing and laughing and calling you _kid _again, and it's all real – even if her voice is tinny on the line, even though it doesn't sound like her, not really, you repeat _it's real_ to yourself. It has to be.

You let Nicky do most of the talking, giving her one- or two-word answers for the hundred questions she seems to fire at you.

"Lorna, are you there? You're breaking up."

"Yes, I am."

She says she wants to visit you. Red's been taking care of the paperwork on the inside, and she can come this weekend if that's okay. Your mouth is dry when you say you can't wait, and the conversation trails off. She says she misses you, she'll see you soon, and there's a long pause before she hangs up, like she wants to say something else, but you hear a soft click and the dial tone instead.

You can't hang up the phone until a CO comes up behind you and gently pries it away from you, asks you to move along.

_She's coming._

_She's coming_, everyone tells you with a smile, and you wish the thought didn't terrify you so much.

You know how this goes.

The yelling, the accusations, the building crumbling down around you as Nicky says she doesn't know you, there was never anything between you, and you watch her walk away from you for the last time.

You take extra care with your hair and makeup that morning, starting and stopping and starting over as your hands shake, and wait for them to call you down to visitation. You brace yourself.

Nicky stands up when you walk in, and you can't believe you forgot how wide her grin is, the way it almost buckles your knees from across the room. She looks different, softer somehow, in her real-world clothes.

You make to sit down at the table without touching her, and she catches you by the arm – she touches you first – saying, "Hey, we're mandated two hugs by law. You gonna cheat me out of one, kid?"

And you find your way to her chest and your arms lock around each other as she kisses you on the forehead, and even though, this close, you can feel all the ways she has changed, the physicality, the utter realness of the moment nearly overwhelms you.

You talk more than you have since you started taking the pills, and everything is back to normal for a little while, though it's still hard to concentrate on the conversation when half of you is preoccupied with the need to just look at Nicky and memorize every line – this time, _this time_ it will work – and there's only a few molecules of space between your hands on the table, so close it makes the hairs on the back of your neck rise, but the guard's already cautioned you twice about touching out-of-bounds and one more time will get Nicky kicked out.

You share the pretzels she buys, and she stays until the end of visiting hours, swears that she'll come back soon as you're wrapped together in your second hug. Time speeds up, and she throws one last look at you over her shoulder before she's gone.

She's left traces of herself all over you. A thousand new images and snippets of conversation and thrills up your spine just from watching her watch you crowd your mind, and you know you won't let them escape this time, you'll keep these ones safe, you can do that.

But every step back to the dorms weakens you a little more, the walls push in and it's hard to breathe because everything is slipping through your fingers again, she's leaving you again, and you'll never quite be sure if the voice you hear in your head is hers or something you imagined, echoing down the pathways of your body like a stray shot from a gun.

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><p>Possibly complete? I'm leaving it open to continuation for now, but I really don't know what I'm doing.<p> 


End file.
